Mumbai Metro II snippets

In a boost to the Maharashtra government’s plans for the Charkop- Bandra-Mankhurd metro Railway corridor, the Centre has approved the Rs 1,532-crore viability gap funding (VGF) for the project. The 38-km route is to be built at a projected cost of Rs 6,192 crore and the availability of the VGF will ensure that it can be built through the public private partnership (PPP) route. The project is expected to be complete in four years’ time, once it takes off.
The corridor will have 27 railway stations and provide north-south and east-west connectivity.
The financial bids for the Charkop-Bandra-Mankhurd corridor, for which seven consortia are vying, are expected to be in by mid-December and the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) is confident that construction work on the line will begin by January-end.
“We are having a pre-bid meeting on Wednesday and expect that the work on the second corridor to start by the end of January,” said Ratnakar Gaikwad, Metropolitan Commissioner.
The groups in the fray for what will be the city’s second Metro Rail corridor are Essar, Alstom and Lanco Infratech; GVK Power and Infrastructure Ltd, Yeoh Tiong Lay and Bombardier Transportation; IL&FS , Transportation Network Ltd, Punjlloyd Ltd, and Soma Enterprises; L&T , IDPL, GE India, IIPL and CAF; Tata Power, Pioneer and Mitsubishi; Reliance Energy, SNC Lavalin; and Reliance Industries, Siemens AG and Gammon India Ltd.
Meanwhile, the MMRDA is still to decide on the model of implementation for the third metro rail corridor that will run from Colaba to Bandra. “We will start deliberation on the model for the third corridor after we finalise the second corridor,” Gaikwad stated. The third corridor mainly underground and thus involves a huge cost of construction and therefore an inordinately large viability gap funding, which may force the state government to go in for a state-funded model and opt out of the Public-Private Partnership model.